What Is Article Spinning?

by on March 1, 2011

I’ve only been working at internet money making for two years now, having gotten the bug fairly late compared to many.  But the internet marketing industry has a bunch of buzzwords that are constantly thrown about and everyone assumes you know exactly what they mean.  Well for you newbies, here you go.

Article spinning is changing the same article slightly to avoid any real or imagined search engine penalties for duplicate content before you post it multiple places.

Take this famous sentence as an example:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

Search for that exact phrase in quotes in Google and you get about 90,000 pages in the results.  If you believe in the duplicate content penalty than making a post on a site with the exact same content as 90,000 other sites, and Google will like your page far less.

Enter spinning!  Some people believe that making your content appear unique (even when it isn’t) provides a benefit in your search engine ranking efforts.

Say you were using article marketing to build backlinks to your site and your article was “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.  People believe that you will lose some linkbuilding “oomf” if you go and submit that exact same article to the big directories like Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, or Articlebase.com.  So many people suggest that such articles should be spun into different versions for each submission to make Google think they are actually different and unique content.

So I would spin my article into many different versions:

The rapid fox leapt over the lying wolf

A shiftless dog is jumped by a swift chocolate canine

Jumping over the dog, the fox quickly sped away

Leaping swiftly, the fox cleared the german shepherd easily

And so on.  I spun these all manually, so they maintain the meaning of the original without appearing completely odd.  There are many software tools that claim to spin automatically, but you typically end up with hard to read junk.  Here are some I did using an automatic spinner set to it’s most unique but lowest quality setting:

the quick darkish he leaped in the laid back canine

the quick brown leafy sibel dived across the care-free canine

the fast brown monk jumped on the very lazy pet

the fast brown monk jumped on the very lazy pet

the fast brown sibel leaped amazingly over the care-free pet dog

the fast brown leafy monk got across the idle canine

Thus the problem with most automatic spinners.  You can replace the words with synonyms, but they are all the same structure and most of them are meaningless.  No idea why the spinner thinks sibel is another word for fox either.

Some people spin only sentences, combining 5 different versions of each sentence into brand new articles.  Some spin only whole paragraphs, others spin every individual word like the above examples.  Others combine all these techniques.  People use terms like “percent unique” where your article has to contain at least 40% unique content to be missed by the search engines check for duplicates.  Others claim 30% is enough, others say 50%.  Measures and techniques vary.

Rules For Spinning

I suggest following two main rules for spinning articles.

  1. If your articles are intended to get organic traffic, only spin manually by rewriting.  No one reading a badly spun article is going to click through in your author box to see your site, other than maybe for a good laugh.  Write one article, save it, close the window, then write the article again.  It’ll be different the second time, and third and fourth.
  2. If you are article marketing just to get backlinks and don’t care about quality, spin away.   Just go deep if  you don’t want a search engine to notice you.  Good software spinners like The Best Spinner will let you nest spun text so that your articles have various numbers of paragraphs, sentences, words, links and the like to avoid detection.

Does spinning help?  Does it hurt?  I’m thinking my next test after the Great Link Building Service Experiment will be to test if spinning makes a difference when link building.

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

Ali April 2, 2011 at 8:01 am

I want to know the answer to that spinning question too. I’ve just got Article marketing robot and a lot of people are saying that they spin their articles a lot. .. but that takes incredible amounts of time. I write an article in like 30 minutes (a really good one) and then spend the rest of the week spinning it manually. I’m searching the net to try and convince myself I don’t have to do that lol.

Please let me know the results of your test. I’m interested.

Do you mind if I plug my new site too? houses for sale in Ireland

Thanks a lot.

Gus March 9, 2012 at 7:27 am

Thanks for the post.

Was just wondering on the topic. Some companies seem to advise taking other articles and spinning into your own content? Isn’t that basically stealing someone else’s idea? I can understanding spinning your own articles and sending them around the web. They yours who cares. But the fact that article stealing is become a hot trend amongst start up online marketing companies is showing one thing. No ethics. If somebody had to use my articles and spin them i would be furious. As Ali said, he spends 30 minutes writing a good article. Some larry character comes along and spins and claims it’s his.

I wish Google would update the Panda shift to the point where it would pick this up. I wrote an article on the matter. Have a look and let me know what your views are http://gdesigns.co.za/

Vince March 23, 2012 at 4:40 am

Thanks for sharing the info about the article. I’ve been searching this sort of information for a while now. I just have one question about it. Should you create one original article and spin it all around or it’s better to write like 10-20 unique ones (after re-writing they become like 100) and then spin them on multiple Article submission sites?

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